GEN-I is a partner in the FutureFlow project

14. January 2016

The FutureFlow project will link interconnected control areas of four TSOs of Central-South Europe, which today do face increasing challenges to ensure transmission system security. The growing share of renewable electricity units has reduced drastically the capabilities of conventional, fossil-fuel based means to ensure balancing activities and congestion relief through redispatching. There is a need to face future balancing and network security challenges with the help of a more intensive and joint approach at regional level. The project, as recently approved under the Horizon 2020 framework of the European Commission, proposes research and innovation activities to validate that consumers and distributed generators can be put in a position to provide balancing and redispatching services in addition to conventional units, within an attractive business environment.

GEN-I amongst the other partners in this consortium have agreed to jointly explore the combination of two routes to provide solutions to such problems through a unique regional cooperation:

The design of a regional cross-border techno-economic cooperation scheme: it is tailored to ensure the participation of advanced commercial and industrial consumers, prosumers and distributed renewable generators in the provision of advanced ancillary services in TSO environments with limited flexibility options.

The development and pilot testing of a comprehensive prototype IT platform and the associated economic model(s) to support this cooperation scheme.

The research and innovation activities involve real energy market players (between 30 and 45 MW of balancing power expected to be made available in the control areas of the four TSOs), this in view of:

Prototyping of innovative flexibility aggregation platforms within all four control zones,

Prototyping of a regional IT platform enabling access of these flexibility aggregation platforms to the international markets

Enabling optimization of relevant functionalities within the TSO environments from the regional perspective,

Pilot testing of these platforms and connections, based on a set of progressively ambitious use cases involving real electricity market players.

An ex-post impact analysis is proposed to deliver recommendations for the scaling-up and replication of the most promising use cases

GEN-I as an experienced aggregator on the ancillary service markets and international trading firm will be involved in the research and development of the requirements for the participation of advanced commercial and industrial consumers, prosumers and distributed renewable generators on ancillary service markets, analysis of cross border potentials for balancing and validation of the prototype platform developed within the project, for the multi-country aggregator.

GEN-I, together with another aggregator within the consortium, with its international infrastructure for electricity supply will acquire up to 40 MW of flexibility with Demand Response and Distributed Generation in four countries (Slovenia, Austria, Hungary and Romania) with purpose of completing pilot tests for ex-post impact analysis and recommendation for scaling up most promising use cases.